Children dying in India's slums has doubled

While the country has developed into an economic superpower, the number of children dying in India's slums has doubled. The country’s growing financial power is hiding a shocking number of deaths among its poorest children.Every year, nearly two million children under five die from a lack of care - one every 15 seconds - the highest number anywhere in the world. More than half of these die before they reach two months old and 400,000 in their first 24 hours, said a new report out yesterday which blames poor public health spending and long-standing inequalities.

Save the Children’s report, says India’s poor are treated unequally and the charity accuses India of failing to provide adequate healthcare for most of its poor one billion people.India's economy will be the fastest-growing by next year, the World Bank predicts and the country is an influential force in the G20. But still it ranks 171st out of 175 countries for public health spending, World Health Organisation figures show.Malnutrition, diarrhoea and pneumonia are the leading causes of child death. Poor countryside states are particularly affected by a lack of health resources. But even in the capital, Delhi, where an estimated 20% of people live in shantytowns, the child death rate is reported to have doubled in a year, though city authorities dispute this.The country will need far more political and financial commitment to meet its promise to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), eight global goals aimed at fixing malnutrition and poverty the report said."Poor countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Peru and the Philippines that are on track to meet MDG explode the myth that the costs of reducing newborn and child mortality are high," Thomas Chandy, chief executive of Save the Children told Reuters news agency.

Going by current trends, India will meet its goal only by 2020, five years after the committed date."There is no real pressure on the government to act, largely because of public perceptions that it is too costly to change the reality. If people understood how affordable and feasible it is to prevent children dying, they'd be shocked," Chandy said.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children